What makes me angry? The education of children. How in God's name can you expect to have a functioning society the way we teach our kids?
In some countries a power exists which, though it is in a degree foreign to the social body, directs it, and forces it to pursue a certain track. In others the ruling force is divided, being partly within and partly without the ranks of the people. But nothing of the kind is to be seen in the United States; there society governs itself for itself. All power centers in its bosom, and scarcely an individual is to be met with who would venture to conceive or, still less, to express the idea of seeking it elsewhere. The nation participates in the making of its laws by the choice of its legislators, and in the execution of them by the choice of the agents of the executive government; it may almost be said to govern itself, so feeble and so restricted is the share left to the administration, so little . do the authorities forget their popular origin and the power from which they emanate. The people reign in the American political world as the Deity does in the universe. They are the cause and the aim of all things; everything comes from them, and everything is absorbed in them.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy
There are two things that a democratic people will always find very difficult, to begin a war and to end it.
A fickle and changeful thing is a woman ever.
Virgil, Aeneid
Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.
Ovid
History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.
Henry Miller, Plexus, 1949
He who does not know his way to the sea should take a river for his guide.Fr., Les rivieres sont des chemins qui marchant et qui portent ou l'on veut aller.
Blaise Pascal, Pensees (VII, 38)
We are in the black theater of nonexistence. In an eye blink the curtain is up, the stage ablaze, for the vast drama of ourselves.
Herman Wouk
The films of The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar always seemed to me mere thin skims of the story lines, and I never did see a meager Hollywood caper called Youngblood Hawke, vaguely based on my 800-page novel. So it was that I opted for television, with its much broader time limits, for The Winds of War.''
Herman Wouk, (interview)
Life was a colorful painful pageant to her, in which right and wrong were wobbly yardsticks. Values and morals varied with time and place. Sweeping righteous views, like Victor Henry's Christian morality and Rule's militant socialism, tended to cause much hell and to cramp what little happiness there was to be had. So she thought.
Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing. Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the People, who have... a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean the characters and conduct of their rulers. There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free 'government' ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty. Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among people.
John Adams
If you are happy with the way things are in the schools, and your children are happy and fulfilled, fine. I'm glad you are happy, and that the schools are doing what you want them to for you. But there are lots of people out there who are very unhappy, and it's to those people that I'm offering this other choice, and saying that they don't have to just accept what's imposed on them. It takes a lot of determination, and some hard work, but you can teach your own!
John Holt
I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Willia
The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.
Theodore Roosevelt, Roosevelt in
What does it mean to say that government might have a responsibility? Government can't have a responsibility any more than the business can. The only entities which can have responsibilities are people.
Milton Friedman
I confess that I cannot understand how we can plot, lie, cheat and commit murder abroad and remain humane, honorable, trustworthy and trusted at home.
Archibald Cox
Liberty never came from government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.
Woodrow Wilson, Speech in New Yo
Since narcissists deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil, on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others.
M Scott Peck
When I have to choose between two evils, I always try to pick the one I haven't tried before.
Mae West
Terrorist are picadors and matadors. They prick the bull until it bleeds and is blinded by rage, then they snap the red cape of bloody terror in its face. The bull charges again and again until, exhausted, it can charge no more. Then the matador, though smaller and weaker, drives the sword into the soft spot between the shoulder blades of the bull. For the bull has failed to understand that the snapping cape was but a provocation to goad it into attacking and exhausting itself for the kill.
Patrick J. Buchanan, Where the R
You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream-the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path.
Ronald Reagan
It is certain that if you would have the whole secret of a people, you must enter into the intimacy of their religion.
Edgar Quinet
Science is Christian, not when it condemns itself to the letter of things, but when, in the infinitely little, it discovers as many mysteries and as much depth and power as in the infinitely great.
Time is the fairest and toughest judge.
In Europe an actor is an artist. In Hollywood, if he isn't working, he's a bum.
Anthony Quinn
The shortest period of time lies between the minute you put some money away for a rainy day and the unexpected arrival of rain.
Jane Bryant Quinn
That laughter costs too much which is purchased by the sacrifice of decency.
John Quinton
Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.
Premature development of the powers of both mind and body leads to an early grave.
Do you think that you shall enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed before you?
Qur'an
If the sea were ink for the words of my Lord, the sea would be spent before the Words of my lord are spent.
As for evildoers, for them awaits a painful chastisement; but for those who believe, and do deeds of righteousness, they shall be admitted to gardens underneath which rivers flow, therein dwelling forever, by the leave of their Lord, their greeting therein: Peace!
All people are a single nation.
Men are the managers of the affairs of women for that God has preferred in bounty one of them over another, and for that they have expended of their property. Righteous women are therefore obedient, guarding the secret for God's guarding. And those you fear may be rebellious admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them.
O unbelievers, I serve not what you serve and you are not serving what I serve, nor am I serving what you have served, neither are you serving what I serve. To you your religion, and to me my religion!
And as for the unbelievers, their works are as a mirage in a spacious plain which the man athirst supposes to be water, till when he comes to it, he finds it is nothing; there indeed he finds God, and He pays him his account in full; (and God is swift at the reckoning).
So let man consider of what he was created; he was created of gushing water issuing between the loins and the breast-bones.
Have We not made the earth as a cradle and the mountains as pegs? And We created you in pairs, and We appointed your sleep for a rest; and We appointed night for a garment, and We appointed day for a livelihood. And We have built above you seven strong ones, and We appointed a blazing lamp and have sent down out of the rain-clouds water cascading that We may bring forth thereby grain and plants, and gardens luxuriant.
One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fiber of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardily.
Jonathan Raban
There's an enduring American compulsion to be on the side of the angels. Expediency alone has never been an adequate American reason for doing anything. When actions are judged, they go before the bar of God, where Mom and the Flag closely flank His presence.
Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserted.
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